Tag: backup

Imagine this… you have two decent network attach storage boxes which regularly backup one to the other using a built in Disk Backup tool – Brilliant huh, sounds almost like a nerdy dream! Now imagine part way through a backup you get a power cut or you just trip over the power cable ripping the plug out the wall… not to worry, things will pick up where they left off… unless those decent boxes are Buffalo LinkStations!

I first discovered this flaw a few weeks back when one of my nightly backups seemed to be taking longer than usual. I gave the box about a day or so to try and fix itself but it still kept saying that the disk backup was in progress and in the admin interface and I was unable to cancel or remove the backup, so it was pretty much stuck as you can see below:

I headed to the official Buffalo support website which seemed to have a fix for this common problem – See for yourself below:

Okay so you have to restore the box to factory defaults… no thanks! I can only assume that because the HS-DHGL is one of their older discontinued products they just can’t be bothered to make a firmware update as it’s not worth their time or effort, but the other option is to use SSH to edit a file which will force the backup to complete.

Getting Unstuck

The following guide will assume you have already enabled SSH and are logged in ready to go, if you haven’t yet enabled SSH see this post here.

First of all we need to locate the backup configuration file and this depends on the job number specified on the admin interface, in my case it was number 1 so we need to type in the following command to open the file in a text editor:

"vi /etc/melco/backup1"

You will now see the configuration file open, hit I (for indigo) on your keyboard to allow inserting of new text and change the line status=running to status=done

Hit the Escape key and then type :wq to save your changes and quit

Head back to the admin interface to the Disk Backup section and you’ll now see the backup showing as complete as seen below:

That’s it – The backup is unstuck, and we haven’t had to restore anything to factory defaults!

Notes

This has been tried and tested on the following models/firmware: HS-DHGL/v2.1

Finally, if you could let me know if you encounter any problems or can confirm if this works for other models I’d be grateful